#IT Operations Management Tweet: Managing Your IT Infrastructure in the Age of Complexity

Good IT is simply good business. But managing IT infrastructure has always been challenging. Virtualization and cloud computing make this even more difficult. In their daily work marketing HP Operations Center (formerly OpenView Operations), authors Peter Spielvogel, John Haworth, and Sonja Hickey frequently encounter organizations struggling with these issues. They have come to realize that IT professionals want simple actionable ideas that will deliver gains in availability, performance, and efficiency. #IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT tweet was written with that in mind.

IT architectures are constantly evolving. Increased complexity and the dynamic nature of virtualized and cloud environments make managing the underlying IT infrastructure harder than ever. Companies need a new management approach that focuses on connecting business services and the end user experience to the underlying infrastructure, incorporating all of the layers from the application to the virtual and to the physical. The concepts of servers, storage, and networks become more fluid, and the relationships among these elements are constantly changing. Where companies could previously use different consoles to manage disparate and static silos, this becomes untenable with virtualization and the added abstraction layer in the cloud. Fortunately, there are some proven best practices that simplify IT infrastructure management in this age of complexity.

Reading this book will not make you an expert on managing IT infrastructure, but it will make you think in a different way about some of your decisions, and those of your peers. If the guidance contained herein starts a discussion in your team that results in you avoiding one big mistake, then the authors will have achieved their goal.

About the Authors

Peter Spielvogel leads the global Product Marketing team for the HP Operations Center (formerly OpenView Operations) product portfolio. Since starting his career twenty-five years ago developing software for financial services companies, he has held marketing, sales, and product management positions at Fortune 500 companies and several startups. Peter is ITIL v3 Foundation certified. He speaks internationally on IT Operations topics, including virtualization, automation, cloud computing, and consolidated operations. His education includes an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a BS in Engineering from Princeton University. He is based in Silicon Valley, California.

Jon Haworth leads Product Marketing for the Service and Operations Bridge within the HP Operations Center product portfolio. He has twenty-five years of experience working for HP across a variety of roles including consulting, pre-sales, and marketing. Jon has designed and implemented large-scale infrastructure management solutions for a number of Fortune 1000 enterprises. Jon is an early adopter and continued advocate for ITIL having gained his ITIL v2 Service Manager certification in 1996.

He speaks extensively throughout Europe and Asia on the advantages of consolidating IT management. Jon has a BS degree in Computer Science from Manchester University. He is based outside London in the UK.

Sonja Hickey leads Product Marketing for the instrumentation product lines within the HP Operations Center product portfolio. She has twenty years of product marketing, product management, engineering, and consulting experience with privately-held, startup, and Fortune 500 companies. Sonja is ITIL v3 Foundation certified. She speaks frequently throughout the U.S. about IT management best practices. Sonja’s education includes an MBA from the University of Chicago GSB and BS and MS degrees in Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is based near Chicago, Illinois.